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  Gravel and Grit

  Khargals of Duras

  Stacy Jones

  Gravel and Grit by Stacy Jones

  Edited by H. Hooks

  Cover by Crimson Phoenix Creations

  Artwork by Vic Grey

  Copyright 2018 © Stacy Jones

  All rights reserved.

  This book is protected under Copyright Laws. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please contact the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this story are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events, business establishments, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Introduction

  A thousand years ago, a Khargal scouting party left Duras, only to crash on a planet called Earth.

  Injured and outnumbered, the stranded Khargals hid among stone effigies and observed the slow evolution of the planet’s primitive inhabitants. With no means of returning to Duras, they watched from their shadowy perches and faded into legend, becoming the mythical gargoyles.

  Until today. Long after any hope for rescue had died, the distress signal has finally been answered.

  It's time to go home.

  Gravel and Grit

  Zaek has waited centuries for rescue, but the time has finally arrived. The beacon has fallen from orbit and gone active. All he needs to do to get off this damn planet called Earth is find it and get to the pick-up location in time. The problem? The beacon comes with an addictively confounding, Earthian female who makes his mating gland swell, marking her as his true mate. Zaek hasn’t been around a human who didn’t run away screaming monster in a millennium, so how the hell is he supposed to convince this smart, beautiful, sarcastic female to give him the opportunity to win her heart before he loses his chance forever?

  Mira has always been obsessed with all things alien, but when one breaks into her lab at Area 51, first contact doesn’t go how she planned. Kidnapped and running for her life with a gruff gargoyle that definitely isn’t made of stone and has more than his share of quirks, Mira learns that sometimes plans are made to be thrown out the window.

  With a black ops team hot on their heels, determined to kill or capture them both, time is running out, and their fumbling romance isn’t the only thing standing in their way to happiness.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  More Khargals of Duras

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Stacy Jones

  Also by Stacy Jones

  Also by Stacy Jones

  Stand-alones

  Also by Stacy Jones

  Also by Stacy Jones

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to candy and finding your puzzle piece.

  1

  Zaek

  Zaek hovered midair for a long moment, sensing something was off, before folding his wings and dropping fifteen feet to land in a crouch on his driveway. He could scent the presence of one of his kind, but the trace was maddeningly hard to pin down, almost as if they had found some way to hide from his usually impeccable sense of smell.

  A growl vibrated his throat, and his tail whipped side to side in agitation as recognition finally hit.

  Spy class. Sneaky bastards. Why in Macero is a spy class Khargal at my fucking house?

  He’d only just learned of the beacon’s activation himself, so there was no way anyone else could have discovered it and made their way to his home already.

  Drawing in a deep breath through his snout, he took in more of the elusive scent. There was something familiar about it. Khargal yes, but with a human undertone and a lingering edge of… gold?

  Roc.

  It had been decades since Zaek had seen the irritatingly gregarious male. While he would not normally welcome a visit from anyone, let alone a sticky-fingered thief like Roc, he was actually glad the hybrid had shown up. Saved him from having to track him down.

  Standing from his crouch, he walked across the yard and up the stairs to his front door. He imagined he’d find Roc tranqed on the floor of the foyer, either from the pressure plate hidden in the tile or the laser sensors, both of which triggered diamond-tipped darts to shoot from hidden recesses in the walls.

  The image caused a smile to pull at his thin lips, baring his sharp fangs.

  Zaek had designed the darts to puncture most any human-made armor, and, as a side-effect, they were strong enough to pierce his kind’s tough hide. Did he really need to fear an assault from the humans on his off-the-grid home in the middle of nowhere? Probably not, but spending the vast majority of a millenium alone had provided him with a few… quirks. Paranoia was, occasionally, one of them.

  Tapping a claw on the hidden security panel, he disengaged the still-active alarm system and opened the unlocked door, but his smirk promptly disappeared when he was not greeted by a sedated body on his floor.

  Turning quickly to the screen set into the wall, he tapped a few buttons and felt his wings quiver with irritation when he discovered Roc had managed to not only circumvent the alarm but had somehow added himself to the system.

  Growling obscenities that the other male had succeeded in bypassing what he’d thought was an impenetrable electronic defense, he slammed the door behind him and followed the faint scent trail to his living room.

  His gaze landed on a grinning Roc, sitting in Zaek’s favorite chair, with his boots propped negligently atop his coffee table, rolling a tranq dart between his hands.

  “How’s it hanging, Sour Puss?” the impertinent male asked, casting Zaek a shit-eating grin, before turning his attention back to the news playing quietly on the television.

  “You are about to be hanging lopsidedly if you do not remove your fucking feet from my furniture,” Zaek threatened lowly, using his favorite Earthian obscenity to express his displeasure.

  Does the ill-mannered hybrid not realize that is my favorite table?

  Obviously, he does not.

  Expecting to be immediately obeyed, he was instead dismissed with a wave of Roc’s nearly clawless hand as the other male focused on the TV. Taken aback, Zaek frowned. Eyeing the news Roc had playing, to see what life-changing information was more important than his very genuine threat, he saw mention
of an archeological dig in Canada.

  “Oh, please. You can just mangle a tree and make another. It’s not like it’s a Louis XIVth.”

  Snorting, Zaek dismissed that when he realized why Roc appeared so interested in a dig where no treasure was likely to be found.

  “Your sire is close to that, yes?” he asked, looking back in time to see a barely perceptible flinch cross his face.

  “Yeah, the stubborn bastard,” Roc snarled.

  “So, you do not plan to move him before they discover him?” Zaek asked, raising the skin over his brow ridge in a wry expression he’d seen on television plays and decided he liked.

  “I still have to find him. He’s gone so deep into the duramna, the stoning, that I can’t even sense him. All I know is he’s somewhere entombed at the foot of Chateau Frontenac.”

  “Hmm. You may want to get started on that. The beacon has fallen from orbit and gone active,” Zaek announced nonchalantly, secretly pleased when Roc promptly choked on a gasp.

  “Say again?” Roc coughed, taking a swig of beer to clear his throat.

  “The rescue beacon just switched on. We are getting off this miserable fucking rock.”

  “How? Where’d you hear that?”

  “I have monitored the frequency since we got here,” he stated, his tone making it clear that that should’ve been obvious. “As we all ought to have been,” he added with a disapproving glance at the younger male.

  “I just thought that shit was wishful thinking.” Roc’s sharp brow furrowed. “And I’ve never been to Duras. Why the fuck should I care?”

  “So, you want to stay here, hiding from the Earthians for the rest of your long life?” Zaek asked disbelievingly. “Regardless of whether you were born here, you do not belong on this planet. You know that.”

  “Yeah, ‘cause my sire’s first family is going to welcome a half-breed with open arms,” Roc responded sarcastically.

  Grunting noncommittally, Zaek kicked Roc’s feet off the table and crossed in front of him to the couch, spreading his wings out to the side so as not to sit on them before dropping down.

  His people were long past the racial intolerance humans still struggled with, so Roc being a hybrid was not an issue, but Zaek could not say with any certainty how a female would react when presented with the news that her long-lost mate was not only not dead but had found another Hondassa and had a child with her. There was a chance she would not take it well and would be displeased at having proof of her mate’s infidelity around her, living in her home.

  Clearing his throat, he spoke without looking at one of the very few people he would call a friend, “You are welcome to join me on my land back on Duras.”

  There was a short pause before Roc answered.

  “Dude, that’s a nice offer, but I’ve got a pretty sweet thing going here,” Roc paused and frowned. “But I know of someone who would go back. If I can wake his ass up.”

  Zaek eyed the other male, genuinely not understanding why he would want to stay on Earth, but he wasn’t going to force him to see sense. Shaking his head, he asked, “Who?”

  “Petronus, my sire, Rocket Scientist,” Roc answered sarcastically and shook his head. “You know, this just might be the news he needs to snap out of his funk.”

  Zaek nodded in understanding, ignoring the impudent hybrid’s annoying habit of assigning him snarky nicknames.

  Zaek couldn’t blame Petronus for retreating into the duramna. He couldn’t imagine leaving his Hondassa on Duras then getting stranded on an alien planet with no hope of rescue.

  The exploratory mission they’d been sent on to find resources was supposed to be a short one. It would’ve been, if the war hadn’t taken a bad turn, but the Ektops had begun to invade Niruba—an uninhabited planet ripe with resources. The Khargals needed those resources, desperately. The lives of their people depended on them. So, their exploratory mission was extended. They searched farther, going beyond charted space to seek a new planet while the struggle continued back home.

  They all thought they’d been blessed by Lar when their sensors found exactly what they were looking for. Unfortunately, as they were passing one of the planets—what they now knew was uninspiredly named Earth—in the target’s system, they were hit by a massive, unpredicted solar flare. The electromagnetic pulse knocked their ship offline, propelling them into Earth’s atmosphere and sending them plummeting to the surface.

  They’d lost many good Khargals that day.

  Aside from causing the tragic deaths and destruction of their ship, the solar flare fried the rescue beacon before it could send a distress signal to Duras. It ejected into space seconds before the crash, but, with it trapped in orbit, repairs were not possible. Not that they could have attempted repairs anyway. The tech on their ship sat out of reach at the bottom of the ocean, and primitive Earthians had no technology to speak of at the time.

  Zaek had waited a millennium for it to fall out of orbit, and now, finally, after centuries of stubbornly clinging to hope, it had.

  He didn’t know how the beacon had come online when he thought it must be inoperable and in need of extensive repairs, but, however it had happened, he was grateful. Now, he just had to find the damned thing and make sure it was sending the correct coordinates to Duras as well as sending out a ping to his brethren’s individual sigils—the multi-purpose medallion that was a communicator and transporter all in one.

  Zaek found their sigils’ similarity to the Delta on the television play, Star Trek, endlessly amusing, if not also a little concerning. He often wondered if one of the sigils had fallen into human hands and was the inspiration behind that bit of fictional technology.

  Roc’s sigh brought Zaek out of his musings. Seeing the expression of reluctance tinged with old heartache brought his thoughts back to Petronus. Roc’s sire had not been able to weather the centuries alone. The lucky bastard had found a second Hondassa—something Zaek hadn’t been able to do once in almost fifteen hundred years—but when she died in childbirth, Petronus lost himself to grief. He went so deep into the duramna, that even his son, his closest blood relation, hadn’t been able to sense him.

  Though all these centuries of being alone had been more than tiresome, he at least had never experienced the pain of losing not just one but two mates. Bitter loneliness was a small price to pay to escape that anguish. And since he held to the Prime Directive, his contact with humans had been absolutely minimal. He’d never been around any Earthians, let alone a female, long enough for them to do anything but run away screaming monster.

  It was actually one of his private concerns that he’d been alone for too long and wouldn’t know what to do with a female when he returned home, even if one pinned him down and tried to mount him. The Earthians had an odd saying about some things being like riding a bicycle, meaning impossible to forget, he assumed but was sure that didn’t apply to mating and damn sure not to a female’s canikin.

  “Wait, wasn’t there some doomsday shit connected with the sigils?” Roc asked suddenly, startling Zaek from visions of fumbling awkwardness.

  Zaek narrowed his eyes at the younger male, taken off guard by the unexpected question. Roc had a terrible habit of exaggerating, and Zaek was sure that’s what was happening here, so he remained silent.

  He has spent too much time around humans, and not nearly enough around his own kind.

  Agreed. It has made him… weird.

  While he wouldn’t put it past the humans to concoct some ridiculous end-of-days prediction about a fucking boot, let alone their sigils that were unexplainably unique in appearance, he hadn’t heard anything himself. Of course, being that he was a hermit, he wouldn’t have heard anything unless a Khargal told him directly, some word of it came over the radio frequencies he obsessively scanned for some sign of rescue, or it showed up in the news on television.

  He did know that some of his brethren had given up all hope of rescue and lost track of theirs. The flagrant disregard for protocol was vexing, but i
t had been a long time since they’d crashed, and some slackening of procedure was inevitable. Zaek hadn’t been overly concerned about the abandoned tech while the beacon was still in space, since the sigils’ basic functions were inactive, but now that everything was online, and rescue was imminent, them being lost was a problem.

  The Prime Directive, the mandate they all lived by, said not to interfere in the lives of more primitive beings. Part of that was not leaving anything behind that could irreversibly alter their technological evolution. Humans had come a long way in the last thousand years, and the possibility of them reverse engineering their tech was real.

  “We need to put out a call. All the sigils must be retrieved immediately. Even your sire’s, regardless of whether or not you decide to stay.”

  “You think?” Roc shook his head at Zaek. “Except my sire, in his ultimate wisdom, didn’t wait till I returned from my little walkabout. He passed it off to his human friend and went to ground. The son of a bitch couldn’t even say goodbye, good luck, don’t fuck-up and get lynched, Roc.”